Jose de Wit did not plan to become an immigration lawyer. He definitely did not plan to run a firm. He had stepped away from a litigation career, landed back in Florida where much of his family lives, and was recovering from a health setback. His California bar license left him with few options in a new state. So he picked up a couple of pro bono immigration cases, mostly to stay busy.

Those cases did not stay quiet for long.

"The pro bono clients turned into paying clients, and then the paying clients multiplied," he recalls, "and all of a sudden I had a small practice, and then a big enough practice that I felt that I was out of my depth." A career he never went looking for had arrived anyway. Years later, from his base in Miami, Jose leads a 13-person employment-based immigration firm, litigates against federal agencies for sport, and is quietly rebuilding how his team works around artificial intelligence.

If there is a single thread running through his story, it is this: he builds while moving. He rarely waits for the perfect conditions, the perfect plan, or the finished blueprint. He starts, and he adjusts.

An Immigration Career That "Just Came to Him"

Immigration was never far from Jose's life. He went through the system himself, arriving in the United States as a student on an F-1 visa, later moving through a marriage-based green card process, and eventually naturalizing. In law school, the interest deepened through hands-on work: a stint in an asylum clinic, and pro bono special immigrant juvenile representation during a summer associate position.

But the obvious path is not the one he took first. He finished law school and joined an AmLaw firm in San Francisco, doing commercial and intellectual property litigation. It was only the detour through Florida, the hiatus, and that license technicality that nudged him back toward immigration.

"It's something that I didn't really seek out," he says. "It just came to me."

What followed was a deliberate apprenticeship. Realizing he was learning to run a business and serve clients well at the same time, Jose went to work for several firms specifically to absorb best practices and find mentorship. He treated the early years as training rather than a destination.

Why Jose de Wit Narrowed His Focus to Employment-Based Immigration

About six years ago, Jose made a decision that would define his practice. He cut everything except employment-based immigration.

The pull came from the clients themselves. Working at a full-service immigration firm, he found himself drawn to the business side: the E-2s and L-1s for small, growing companies setting up new offices in the United States, the startups, the founders. "I realized that was the part I enjoyed the most about the job," he says, "helping the clients figure out how to make the immigration strategy serve their business strategy and not vice versa."

There was also a quieter motivation. "I don't love going to immigration court," he admits. "I realized that was a part of the job that I liked the least. So cutting it out was not painful."

Building the Firm: The Part Nobody Warns You About

When Jose set out on his own, he expected the work to feel familiar. As an associate, his job had been simple in scope: produce excellent legal work, give clients a great experience, and nothing else. He assumed running his own firm would be mostly that, "topped off with like a little 10% of miscellaneous admin work and occasional marketing."

The reality inverted that ratio. "Running the firm takes up much more bandwidth than the legal work itself," he says. Marketing, business development, human resources, bookkeeping, trust accounts: none of it had been on his radar, and all of it landed on his desk. To his surprise, he enjoyed entrepreneurship. "It's been a different challenge and a different muscle that I had to develop."

His advice for lawyers considering the same leap is refreshingly honest, because he refuses to pretend he followed it himself. The textbook answer, he acknowledges, is to get your ducks in a row first: a template retainer agreement, an operating agreement, the firm name, the trademark. But he watched a friend at a large national firm chase exactly that checklist for three years, perfecting every variable, and still launch nothing.

"Sometimes you just have to be okay with figuring it out as you go," Jose says.

He started his own firm without an engagement letter and took whatever cases walked through the door, including removal work he had not touched in years. The engagement letter came later, built clause by clause from real experience. "It's hard to map it out in the abstract," he says. "You have to start with something."

Inside the Practice: From H-2B Labor Visas to EB-1A Extraordinary Ability Cases

Today, De Wit Immigration Law runs an unusually wide practice for a firm its size. Roughly a third of the work is high-volume labor immigration: H-2B, J-1, and TN visas for employers in landscaping, construction, hospitality, and fishing, industries whose staffing needs swing hard with the seasons.

The rest of the practice sits at the opposite end of the spectrum: O-1 and EB-1A extraordinary ability cases, often for venture-backed startups, alongside E-1, E-2, and L-1 petitions for multinational companies. Many of those clients come from Latin America, and so do most of the people at the firm. That is intentional. The team offers what Jose calls a Spanish-first experience for entrepreneurs and multinationals setting up in the United States.

Ask him for his favorite type of work, though, and he does not name a visa. He names a fight.

About 15 percent of the practice is federal litigation: mandamus actions to force decisions on stalled cases, and challenges to improper denials. "I really enjoy telling the agencies what's what," he says. "If I could do that all day, that would be a lot of fun."

His most memorable case stretched that work further than usual. Alongside co-counsel, Jose represented roughly 20 EB-5 investors whose petitions had been delayed, consolidating them into one large mandamus action. Most mandamus cases resolve quickly after the complaint and some negotiation. This one did not. It moved through summary judgment and stages of litigation that immigration cases rarely reach, with help from immigration counsel for each investor and a California commercial litigation firm brought in for the procedural fine print. A judge eventually ordered mediation, and the parties worked out tailored solutions for each plaintiff.

"It was a long, drawn out fight, and it was fun," he says. For a lawyer who left immigration court behind, the courtroom clearly never lost its appeal. It just had to be the right kind.

What Businesses Get Wrong About Immigration Strategy

Jose's vantage point, sitting between fast-growing companies and a federal bureaucracy, gives him a clear read on where employers stumble.

The most common mistake is underestimating the lift. "They consistently underestimate how long things take and how much work on their end it'll take," he says. No matter how smooth a firm makes the process, clients still have to gather documents and track down letters. Jose describes a familiar loop: a founder asks if an O-1 can be filed next month, promises everything within a week, and is still chasing recommendation letters three months later.

His second observation is structural. As companies grow, immigration tends to happen by accident. A manager in California hires one attorney for one employee, a manager in Illinois hires a different attorney for someone else, and soon the company has inconsistent filings, uneven pricing, and no coherent policy.

His advice follows directly. Start planning early. And if hiring foreign nationals will be more than a one-off, find an immigration attorney you want to work with for the long term, "somebody who you'll want to work with long term to build an immigration program," rather than treating each case as an isolated event. Immigration, in his view, should become a function of the business, with real processes around it.

How Jose de Wit Is Using AI to Reshape His Immigration Practice

This is where Jose stops sounding like a typical immigration attorney.

His firm is, in his words, knee-deep in AI. He is personally building an automation system to draft TN cover letters, support letters, and other supporting materials, starting with TN cases precisely because they are simple and rule-bound. He plans to roll it out to his team after running more cases through it, and his early estimate is striking: a reduction of at least 50 percent in paralegal and associate time on the cases where it works.

The efficiency is only half the point. The other half is consistency. Jose describes a slow drift that affects many firms: a paralegal in a hurry grabs a support letter from a similar past case, reuses it as a starting point, and over time the firm's templates quietly diverge. Purpose-built AI tools, he argues, can hold the work product to a consistent standard.

He has pushed the same thinking into the front of the business. Before a consultation, an AI tool synthesizes the intake call transcript and intake form into a one-page brief on whom he is about to meet. Afterward, it turns his own consultation transcript into a brief for the legal team, complete with strategy and next steps, and even generates training notes for the intake team wherever the consult surfaced something the intake materials missed.

Notably, Jose does not write code. He is candid that a general sense of how software works helps, knowing what a script or a terminal is, but the technical barrier is lower than most lawyers assume. His message to skeptical colleagues is practical. If the fear is client confidentiality, paid products and a careful read of the terms go a long way, and there are ways to get value from AI without feeding it sensitive documents at all. If the fear is the technology itself, the fix is almost circular: the AI will teach you how to use it. Describe your problem, ask what it needs from you, and it will give you step-by-step direction.

"The learning curve is not as terrifying as it seems," he says. "You just have to be okay with tinkering."

The Future of Immigration Law: A Widening Divide

Jose is careful not to overpredict. "I don't know how it's going to change the industry," he says of AI. But he does see a split coming.

He compares it to an earlier divide, the gap between firms still handing clients paper questionnaires and firms using modern intake tools. The next gap, he believes, will separate firms that genuinely harness AI to run more efficiently and serve clients better from those that do not.

On robotics and automation more broadly, he is measured. The impact will be industry-specific. He points to a former hospitality client that built self-check-in software to reduce on-site staffing, yet still needed enough workers to make the H-2B program essential. "A slick platform is not going to make a bed," he says. Technology, in his view, makes people more efficient rather than replacing them outright.

It is a fitting note for a lawyer whose whole career has been an exercise in adaptation. Jose de Wit never planned the path he is on. He took the cases in front of him, learned the business by doing it, started a firm before he had the paperwork, and is now rebuilding that firm around tools most of his peers have not touched yet.

Asked to reflect on the wisdom he might pass along, he waves the word off. "Wisdom is probably overstated," he says. But the throughline of his story is hard to miss, and it is worth more than the modesty suggests: have a direction, stay flexible, and be willing to figure it out as you go.